Keyword: classism

Striding to the podium with a mysterious, camouflage utility bag slung over his shoulder, Phil Robertson, the Duck Commander, took possession of the Potomac Ballroom stage on Friday and those within earshot of his reverberating voice. Mr. Robertson, without the expected trappings of political convention, exudes gravitas. His manner of speaking is unaffected and confident, embellished only with the ornament of truth. He’s a fitting recipient of Andrew Breitbart’s Defender of the First Amendment Award. From his well used bag, Mr. Robertson pulled a heavy tome, worn with so much use that its’ integrity is only preserved by the generous...

Sunday, December 07, 2014 Fat Class Warfare Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog There was a time when fat was in and thin was out. Obesity was the privilege of wealth and being thin meant being poor. In simpler societies, before slumming became a romantic pose, there was nothing attractive about not having enough to eat. To be fat was to be part of the leisure class. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming. Then...

<p>A student at Georgetown University wrote in an op-ed piece that he was 'Not at all' shocked that a recent mugging he suffered at gunpoint took place.</p>
<p>Senior Oliver Friedfeld said in his piece,'I Was Mugged, And I Understand Why,'that he questioned his own ability to criticize his attackers,citing his 'perch of privilege.'</p>

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke at Booker T. Washington High School, a predominantly black school, in Atlanta on Monday. During her speech a student fainted. Obama paused her speech to make sure the child was attended to, then she took a weird swipe at “rich kids.” White House Dossier posted the transcript: MRS. OBAMA: But here’s the thing –- even if you’re working hard and doing everything right, there will still be times when things don’t go according to plan. That ever happen to you all? STUDENTS: Yes…. (student faints) MRS. OBAMA: Are you all still fired up and ready...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/dining/so-much-food-it-fits-a-hall.htmlHere is the link. Go to the source for more. I thought it was interesting to see what they like titillating their jaded palates with.

The progressive Nation, offers up an interesting analysis of the Cantor defeat on Tuesday. They rightly recognize that Dave Brat is a different type of small government candidate and that he may be part of a group coming up in politics right now which is legitimately anti-crony capitalist. We’ll see how Brat does, but at this moment the American political calculus has changed fundamentally for the better. (From The Nation) In his new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State (Nation Books), Ralph Nader argues that there are many issues on which an anti-corporate left and...

Three faculty members walked out of the Louisiana Tech University commencement ceremony Saturday to show their disdain for alumnus Phil Robertson. Students in the Louisiana Tech's LGBTQ organization, Prism, sparked the idea via social media.

A gunman in a black BMW opened fire on crowds of people Friday night in a Southern California seaside town near UC Santa Barbara, killing six people and injuring seven others in what investigators described as a "mass murder" rampage. The gunman was later involved in at least one shootout with sheriff's deputies and died of a gunshot wound to the head, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said at a Saturday morning news conference. He could not confirm whether the gunshot was self-inflicted. Seven victims were hospitalized and at least one of them had undergone surgery for life-threatening injuries,...

A fungus called coffee rusts is currently causing damages of more than $1 billion across Latin American region coffee farms, and it is affecting the prices of coffee in the United States. ...But Raj Shah, head of the USAID, said their main concern is not only on the rising price of coffee but more on the economic security of small farms abroad. He said that if farmers lose their jobs, it escalates poverty and hunger and poverty region and this will add to the problem of violence and drug trafficking.

The South Fla doctor who billed Medicare for $21 million in 2012 alone, is a generous political donor to NJ Sen Robert Menendez, now under investigation by federal public corruption prosecutors. The millionaire surgeon, lives luxuriously in North Palm Beach, Fla, and travels by private jet, to his luxe villa in the Dominican Republic. Menendez took free rides on the doctor’s private jet and stayed at his luxury resort villa in the Dominican Republic. The senator was forced to pay back the cost of the travel under scrutiny. Melgen donated over $700,000 to Menendez's PAC......Menendez made calls on the Melgen’s...

The rich keep getting richer -- and the gap between the super rich and poor has widened even more under President Barack Obama. According to a report from Sadoff Investment Research, the "average household in the top 1% pulled in earnings of $1,264,065 in 2012," which is "41 times greater than the $30,997 average income of Americans." But the top .1% did considerably better than the top 1%, posting "average earnings of $6,373,782, or 206 times the average families' income."

RUSH: Have you seen, ladies and gentlemen, the new Cadillac commercial for their new electric car? (interruption) You haven't? It features the actor Neal McDonough. Do you watch Justified? (interruption) Well, Neal McDonough was in Justified two years ago. He's got this baby-shaped head, blue eyes, short, blond hair. He can play the nicest next-door neighbor or the evilest villain you've ever found. He is the actor in this commercial. The left hates this commercial. There are caustic posts on leftist websites, and even mainstream news sites, Huffing and Puffington Post. They're outraged over the Cadillac ad! If you've seen...

Now that the big game is over it is time to rethink professional football. Many young progs are running around claiming “team ownership”, touting that it is “their” team is the best. The ugly truth is that the teams are owned by some bourgeois one percenter and they owe you, the fans, nothing. They are exploiting you and getting rich as a result. Football is a business and you have been tricked into buying branded items to advertise for them with no compensation! Stop being exploited! The last big game also showed disparity in awarding points. Denver worked so hard...

I was thinking just now about Huey P. Long, and how the hard times of the 1920s, and the so-called “Bourbons” — the elites that ruled Louisiana back then — produced Long’s governorship. Mind you, Long was an extremely savvy politician and peerless orator. He played the peckerwood on the stump, but he was so intelligent that he finished Tulane Law School in a single year and passed the state bar. He never went to college as an undergraduate; despite winning a debate scholarship to LSU, he couldn’t attend because he couldn’t afford the textbooks. Anyway, Long had a matchless...

In 2012, the actor Robert Downey Jr., played the role of Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, in “The Avengers.” For his work in that single film, Mr. Downey was paid an astounding $50 million. Does that fact make you mad? Does his compensation strike you as a great injustice? Does it make you want to take to the streets in protest? Certainly, $50 million is a lot of money. The typical American would have to work for about 1,000 years in order to earn that much. That sum puts Mr. Downey in the top ranks of American earners. Anything more...

Is success being vilified in America? The successful seem to think so. A new poll from American Express Publishing and Harrison Group finds that 1 percenters no longer like to be seen as such. One-third of members of the group said they "like it when others recognize me as wealthy." Though that number (taken in the fourth quarter of 2013) may sound high, it's down from 40 percent a year earlier. And it's far below the 53 percent who agreed with the statement in 2010.

Microsoft’s cloud chief, Satya Nadella, will lead the company as its next chief executive, according to a report from Bloomberg. Microsoft’s board is “preparing to name” Nadella chief executive, Bloomberg reported Thursday afternoon. Nadella, whose official title is executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, had been one of the front-runners in the race to replace current chief executive Steve Ballmer, who said last August that he planned to step down within a year. But the board is also considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman of the company, Bloomberg reported, ousting the company’s co-founder and possibly replacing him...

WASHINGTON — Hank Ronan knew he would get the job. He had sailed through three rounds of interviews and hit it off with the doctors at the diagnostic center in Annandale, Va., where he had applied to be a driver for $11 an hour. Shuttling patients to appointments was a world away from his 20 years as a software engineer, but it was the best that Ronan could find after being laid off in 2011. He was eager to get back to work and granted the doctor’s office permission to run a credit check. Ronan never heard back, he said...

IN 12th grade, my friend Ryan and I were finalists for the Silver State Scholars, a competition to identify the “Top 100” seniors in Nevada. The finalists were flown to Lake Tahoe for two days of interviews. On the plane, Ryan and I met a boy from Las Vegas. Looking to size up the competition, we asked what high school he went to. He said a name we didn’t recognize and added, “It’s a magnet school.” Ryan asked what a magnet school was, and spent the remaining hour incredulously demanding a detailed account of the young man’s educational history: his...

With business investments and a family inheritance, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and his wife have accumulated millions of dollars in assets and generated income last year well above his congressional salary, according to his most recent financial disclosure statement. Mitt Romney’s newly announced running mate reported assets in the range of $2 million to $7.7 million. The largest was the interest that his wife, Janna, holds in a trust resulting from the 2010 death of her mother, Prudence Little. Her interest in the trust falls in the range of $1 million to $5 million, Ryan reported. Ryan also...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Can you really be poor if you own a flat-screen TV ... or two? Depends on whom you ask. With income inequality at the center of the national political debate this year, it should be no surprise that conservatives and liberals are coming down on opposite sides of the tracks. Conservatives point to spending patterns, saying consumption is a better indicator of living standards than income. Using that metric, the nation's poor are living better than they have been in decades, enjoying many of the amenities that the middle class have.

SAN DIEGO — At Mitt Romney’s proposed California beach house, the cars will have their own separate elevator. There’s also a planned outdoor shower and a 3,600-square foot basement — a room with more floor space than the existing home’s entire living quarters. Those are just some of the amenities planned for the massive renovation of the Romneys’ home in the tony La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, according to plans on file with the city. A project this ambitious comes with another feature you don’t always find with the typical fixer-upper: its own lobbyist, hired by Romney to push...

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in...

General Electric Antares Group living BIG at Beaver Creek Resort with private ski instructors at $745 USD a day for EACH PRIVATE INSTRUCTOR! (Not what the teachers make, that's what the ski school gets to rent a private instructor for ONE DAY.) They are getting private race coaching and rented the NASTAR Race Course for most of today. Private racing for GE HONCHOS! After he passed on this information I went to NASTAR.com and found the race, complete with names. I wasn't sure everyone on the list was connected with GE Antares because there are a bunch of Colorado addresses....

Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax return on Monday. His total income for the year was listed as $21.6 million, more than one-half of which came from capital gains. How does that stack up against your income? Enter your annual income below to find out how long it would have taken Mitt Romney to earn the same amount of money.

Here’s the worst thing you probably haven’t heard about President Barack Obama’s health care plan, which he and his allies are about to force through the Congress despite enormous opposition from the American people: it makes everything onetime vice presidential nominee John Edwards once said about the class divide of “two Americas” come true. The dirty little secret of this plan-which wouldn’t be a secret if opponents of this legislative package weren’t distracted by a dozen other wrongheaded policies in it-is that it will bring a major and irreversible upheaval to America’s labor markets. In a time of economic tension,...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Social Networking Class War: MySpace Vs. Facebook Claire Cain Miller 07.23.07, 6:00 AM ET A flurry of recent articles have observed that young people are leaving MySpace for Facebook in droves, setting off speculation that MySpace is becoming the latest victim of fickle teens following the hot new thing. Not so, says University of California, Berkeley, researcher Danah Boyd. Not all teens are leaving MySpace, she wrote in a recent essay--instead, they're splitting up along class lines. Boyd confirms what teens in any high school across the country already know: Affluent kids from educated, well-to-do families have been fleeing MySpace...

John Kerry's insult actually offered a little insight. His "advice" to students at Pasadena City College in California would have been conventional wisdom on almost any "elite" campus, particularly in the Ivy League, where just about anyone is eager to tell you that only chumps go to Iraq -- or anywhere within the sound of the guns. When President Nixon ended the draft of an earlier generation the principled protests against the Vietnam War vanished overnight. Most of the Ivy League schools continue to bar the ROTC from campus. Harvard booted ROTC in 1969 and banished it again in 1993,...

Good news is bad news for those who need bad news.According to data released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau, college-educated black men earn less than their white counterparts, providing evidence of America's continued discrimination against blacks. College-educated black women, however, earn more than their white counterparts, providing further evidence of America's continued discrimination against blacks. If there seems to be a conflict in logic between these two conclusions, then that's probably because you are a racist. Or perhaps you just lack the razor-sharp deductive reasoning of the folks at the Associated Press, who implied such conclusions in a...

My mother is a teacher and has started working on her Masters Degree. One of her courses is on Family Therapy and she has to plot out her extended family as part of the course work. "Family Themes" was one of things she needed to write down so she asked me for ideas about some of our family themes. I started to look through her textbook to get a better idea of exactly what they wanted. Here is just some of what I found: The Expanded Family Life Cycle Individual, Family, and Social Perspectives Third Edition Edited by Betty Carter...

Fifty years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, the debate about race and academic performance has in many places gone terribly off the mark. The remarkable achievement of the Supreme Court ruling, which declared the legal segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional, was the foundation set for equality of opportunity. Today, the focus has shifted from equality of opportunity to equality of academic result and -- even further from the point -- to issues only indirectly related to schooling. Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, for example, perceives freely chosen residential patterns in America as a basis...

<p>WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate, Inc.) -- In his uncompromising condemnation of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, President Bush has no more reliable and important supporter than his erstwhile political foe Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.</p>
<p>John McCain, an authentic American hero who knows firsthand the pain of combat, has said: "War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers."</p>

Doctors Shrugged by Russell Madden Forty-five years ago, an immigrant from Russia (who might well have been denied admittance to this country had she faced today's oppressive restrictions) published a novel that described men of intellect withdrawing from the world. Rather than submit to increasingly onerous and stultifying laws and regulations, these business people, artists, and scientists refused to work under such chains. Better, they decided, to deny others the benefits of their skills, their knowledge, and their experience than to labor as little more than beasts of burden for unforgiving and demanding masters. The fictional scenario that Ayn Rand...